Holy Fool

“Falstaff” at the Met.

As Falstaff, Ambrogio Maestri all but dances his way through the part.

Photograph by Beatriz Schiller

In 2013, the Metropolitan Opera marked the bicentennials of Wagner and Verdi—the schismatic popes of nineteenth-century opera—by mounting new productions of their final masterpieces, “Parsifal” and “Falstaff.” On the surface, the two works seem radically unalike, confirming the stereotypical polarity between light-suffused Italianate values and the forest dusk of Germanic tradition. But there is common ground between them. Both are tales of fools: the “pure fool” of Wagner’s quasi-Christian allegory, who learns compassion and heals spiritual wounds, and the indomitable rascal of Verdi and Arrigo Boito’s Shakespeare adaptation, who, through wounds of a self-inflicted sort, teaches his companions that “the world is but a joke, man is born a clown.” Each work, in its way, looks past dull reality in search of shadowy truths. Franz Werfel summarized the continuity thus: “‘Falstaff’ is the comedy of overcoming the world, just as ‘Parsifal’ is the mystery play of overcoming the world.”

Verdi himself sealed the connection by inserting a quotation from “Parsifal” into Falstaff’s despairing monologue at the start of Act III. As Falstaff sings “Che giornataccia nera” (“What a black, bad day”), the strings play a prowling motif associated with Wagner’s emasculated magician Klingsor, who tries to ensnare Parsifal in his flower-maiden garden. No doubt, a degree of irony is intended—Verdi resented Wagner’s influence over Italian music at the end of the nineteenth century, and in this passage he seems to be mocking rampant Wagnerism—yet the allusion is actually quite precise. Just as Klingsor’s garden is exposed as a mirage covering a wasteland, Falstaff’s merry façade falls away, revealing an inner void. Wagner, for his part, loved the Falstaff plays. As Peter Conrad observes, in his recent book “Verdi and/or Wagner,” the Meister once entertained his guests by playing the “Parsifal” Prelude at the piano and then reciting from the Falstaff scenes in “Henry IV, Part 2.” Cosima Wagner remarked, “We found little difficulty in passing from the Saviour to Sir John!”

At the Met, the transition hasn’t been quite so easy. “Parsifal,” which played back in February and March, came off better. The production, by François Girard, offered a thinly peopled array of steel-gray and blood-red tableaux, evocative of a postapocalyptic cult gathering. Despite lapses and longueurs, it proved an authentically strange, disorienting experience: the director and his cast were grappling with the toughest philosophical questions of the piece, even if, inevitably, they had no answers. The most striking moment came at the end, when the cursed wanderer Kundry, rather than being shut out of the final Holy Grail ritual, found a place of honor within it, uncovering the sacred cup and holding it aloft. The gesture echoed Wagner’s unrealized plan for a Buddhist opera, “The Victors,” about the first woman to be ordained by the Buddha.

Robert Carsen’s new staging of “Falstaff,” which opened in early December and plays through January 11th, is, by contrast, puzzlingly skin deep. The director, among the most prolific and resourceful in the opera world, had done well in two earlier projects at the Met: his “Eugene Onegin,” first seen in 1997, was spare and piercing, and his widely travelled “Mefistofele,” which came to the Met in 1999, was an ironic feast of kitsch. Among other Carsen productions, I particularly admired a “Frau Ohne Schatten,” in Vienna, which transferred Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s fairy-tale plot to the high-bourgeois salons of the Viennese fin de siècle, to unexpectedly harrowing effect.

In his “Falstaff,” which previously appeared at the Royal Opera House, Carsen moves the action to the nineteen-fifties, when England’s imperial spaces were being converted to more mundane uses. Shakespeare’s Garter Inn, for example, becomes a stuffy old hotel that must accommodate the nouveau riche. The sets, by Paul Steinberg, conjure a collision between fading pomp and American-style consumer culture: Alice Ford presides over a palatial Formica kitchen. All well and good, but where, exactly, does Falstaff fit in this Clement Attlee universe? I couldn’t make out whether he is supposed to be a gentleman who has fallen on hard times or a low-born fellow putting on airs. And either profile seems too confining for the outlaw energies that fire the Falstaff spirit. His lusty shenanigans, and the pranks that the merry wives hatch in response, get lost in the immaculate art direction, and extended pauses between scenes sap momentum.

The laboriousness of the show is a pity, because a generally fine cast—including Angela Meade, a vocally agile Alice Ford, and Stephanie Blythe, a booming Mistress Quickly—works hard to spice up the ensembles. And Ambrogio Maestri, in the title role, has the makings of a once-in-a-generation Falstaff. His voice rings out freely, and he sings with incisive diction and an instinctive understanding of Verdi’s compressed, propulsive phrases. A bear of a man, he moves nimbly, all but dancing his way through the part. What’s missing, at least in this outing, is the undertow of melancholy—the existential chill that emerges at the beginning of Act III and when, later, Falstaff counts out the chimes at midnight. Perhaps James Levine’s conducting is partly responsible; on the second night of the run, Levine was in full command of Verdi’s fabulous musical machinery, but the crypto-Wagnerian textures in the final act failed to register. There should be a sense of an abyss opening beneath the music. It closes quickly, yet the memory of it lingers to the end.

The Met is fond of decorating its advertising material with closeups of its more movie-star-like stars. On the cover of the 2013-14 brochure, Mariusz Kwiecien and Anna Netrebko, promoting “Eugene Onegin,” clutch each other in the style of a Hollywood period romance; elsewhere, Jonas Kaufmann strikes a foxy pose. Such campaigns are evidently deemed essential in the eternal hunt for new audiences, though I sometimes wonder how well they’re working. At a recent “Rosenkavalier,” long a reliable draw, I saw rows of vacant seats, and the house grew emptier as the evening went on. One gent across the aisle from me spent the first act fussing with his iPhone, ignoring the elegant Austrian soprano Martina Serafin as she gave a poised, idiomatic reading of the Marschallin’s monologue (“Time is a strange thing”). Why had he bothered to pay three hundred bucks? Who were these people who strolled out after Act II, missing some of the most absurdly beautiful music ever composed for voices? I left feeling unusually morose about the fate of opera in New York.

On certain nights this fall, though, the atmosphere changed. In a revival of Herbert Wernicke’s 2001 production of “Die Frau Ohne Schatten,” the soprano Christine Goerke gave a career-transforming performance as the Dyer’s Wife, displaying the kind of vocal stamina that Wagner-Strauss fanciers have been awaiting since Birgit Nilsson delivered her last “Hojotoho!” Goerke first made her name in Handel, Gluck, and Mozart, in the late nineteen-nineties; after a brief vocal crisis, she reëmerged with a startlingly strong dramatic-soprano instrument. Just as important, she can create a character as she sings, linking musical phrases to form dramatic paragraphs. She was rewarded with an ovation rather more voluminous than the one that Netrebko received on the opening night of “Onegin.”

A similar charge went through the house in the middle of a run of “Norma,” when Meade assumed the title role and the lavishly gifted young mezzo Jamie Barton sang Adalgisa. Again, characters emerged not through the striking of poses but through the shaping of the musical line. Again, there was pandemonium in the audience. The pure charisma of voice is, finally, what people come to opera for. Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, hasn’t been associated with a voices-first philosophy, but after Goerke’s triumph in “Frau” he showed admirable flexibility in signing her up for a series of major roles, including Elektra, Turandot, and Brünnhilde. If the Met’s marketing can convey what it’s like to hear such a voice incandescing before your ears, there will be no empty seats. ♦